With each recent revelation about the NSA’s spying programs government officials have tried to reassure the American people that all three branches of government — the Executive branch, the Judiciary branch, and the Congress — knowingly approved these programs and exercised rigorous oversight over them.

As James Risen and Nick Wingfield reported yesterday in the New York Times, the interests of tech companies and the NSA have been converging over the past decade in two ways. The first way is fairly prosaic: Lots of Silicon Valley companies are in the business of selling stuff to the NSA: storage hardware, sophisticated communications equipment, data analytics software, and more. But while this may have increased recently, it’s not fundamentally new. It’s just the latest high-tech twist on the good old military-industrial complex.